It was the first foreign film nominated for a "best
picture" Oscar.
Ingmar Bergman ("Autumn Sonata"/"Wild
Strawberries"/"Fanny and
Alexander")
directs a darkly perceptive psychological drama about
the human
condition
that exposes a dysfunctional family and its many
unpleasant secrets.
It's
a beautifully photographed but painful film to watch,
one that is
hardly
enjoyable and not an easy one to explain through an
intellectual theory
without putting into play a religious offering that
was not overt in
the
film except in a sublime way. It's not only superbly
acted but visually
powerful, as photographed by cinematographer Sven
Nykvist. It's a
"woman's
pic," about their bodies, their deep thoughts and
their suffering. It
offers
an emotionally turbulent look into dying as well as a
penetrating look
into the female soul, and laments that its dying
virgin heroine can't
bring
her woeful sisters to understand before it's too late
that life's true
pleasures might only last in the memories that are
filled with a
nurturing
love.

It's set at the turn-of-the-century in an
eighteenth-century remote
Swedish manor country house that has the striking
blood red interior of
a Las Vegas whorehouse. The women occupants all wear
formal white
dresses
except after the death of the dying sister, when they
change to black
dresses.
The unmarried thirtysomething Agnes (Harriet
Andersson) has led an
empty
life and lives alone with Anna (Kari Sylwan), her
loyal peasant
housekeeper
of the last twelve years, and is bedridden and is
dying of cancer while
riddled with unbearable pain causing her to frequently
scream out in
agony.
She's visited by her two estranged sisters; the oldest
Karin (Ingrid
Thulin)
is an embittered, sexually repressed, and domineering
bitchy woman who
is married to a mean-spirited diplomat (Georg
Årlin) she hates,
and
has only come as a sense of duty. The youngest sister,
the beautiful
but
unfeeling, sexually obsessed, and self-absorbed
childlike Maria (Liv
Ullmann),
is married to the lost soul businessman Joakim
(Henning Moritzen).

The shallow and indecisive Maria refuses to come to
the aid
of her
husband when he stabs himself because of her
infidelity; he survives
and
stays with her in this loveless marriage. Maria had an
affair with the
local doctor (Erland Josephson) she seduced when he
came over to treat
Anna's young daughter, who later died. In the film's
most ghastly
scene,
Karin mutilates herself with a shard of glass in her
vagina and then
insanely
smiles at her husband as she smears the blood on her
face.

Anna, acting like a Virgin Mary figure, comforts the
agonizing Agnes
with her breasts when she cries out in pain, which
also hints that they
could possibly be lovers. Her warmhearted response to
suffering is
genuine,
and is compared with the sisters' cold and insincere
responses and
organized
religion's cold and calculated responses to Agnes's
suffering. Bergman
showed that the deceptive lives we lead and our blind
acceptance of
society
in order to ensure public approval cannot be compared
favorably with
the
person (Anna) who leads a truthful life that is
visionary, touching and
compassionate.